Title: Blood Which Burns

Series: Liquid Onyx, Book Five

Author: BL Jones

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: 05/06/2025

Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex

Pairing: Male/Male

Length: 128900

Genre: Fantasy, family drama, gay, sci-fi/fantasy, superheroes, vigilante

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Description

Three months ago, Rex discovered a world-shattering truth about what it means to be a Liquid Onyx survivor and experienced devastating losses in the process.

Rex, momentarily gripped by raw fury and freshly torn grief, committed an act of shocking violence and was reforged by it.

Unable to face his new, fractured reality, he ran away from everyone who loved him and threw himself into the life of a morally grey vigilante.
Every choice Rex makes pushes him one step closer to embracing his father’s legacy. But there are other legacies who won’t let Rex fall into that darkness without a fight.

At his lowest point, will Rex find the strength and courage to step out of Alex Nova’s shadow and finally become the man—and the hero—everyone needs him to be?

Excerpt

Blood Which Burns
BL Jones © 2025
All Rights Reserved

ANDY

I was six the first time I broke into my mum’s lab.

Even at that age, I knew I wasn’t allowed in there because it was full of dangerous and fascinating things.

I had to break into the lab at least two dozen times before Mum gave in and simply took me down there with her.

She would sit me up at a table and give me work to do. Just simple things at first, calculating equations and mixing low-risk substances as required.

When I watched my mum move through her lab, I marvelled at her intellect. She knew so much, understood so much of the world that I did not.

It seemed to me she was one of the most brilliant people alive, and I wanted to be exactly like her.

Then there was my dad, a man like a natural disaster, unrelenting and inexplicably dangerous, his unique genius as captivating and destructive to watch as a tornado tearing across continents. His mind was unrivalled, a man destined to change the world.

And he did. With my mum’s help. My parents were the creators of Liquid Onyx, the gods of superheroes, the killers of children.

But, in most ways, Alex Nova was the man who taught me how to swim at our local pool and how to do a cartwheel, who took me out for ice cream when I did well on a test in school. He was the man who tickled me until I cried with laughter and dried my tears away when I got hurt falling off my skateboard. He was the man who told me I could do anything I wanted with my life because I was brave and clever, when all anyone else did was call me pretty.

My dad was my hero, not because of his extraordinary mind or the things he could do with it, but because he was my dad, and I loved him desperately.

When he died, my world crumbled and my heart broke. A piece of my childhood was set ablaze, never to be recovered from the ashes.

From then, it was just Mum and me. Mum became my everything; there was no one else, really. She didn’t want me to have any contact with my dad’s side of the family, and her side didn’t want anything to do with either of us.

Mum tried to make up for it by always being there when I needed her, by being my best friend. She came to all my science competitions and supported my academic dreams with all the attention, energy, and money she could spare. She bought me enough books to sink a ship and took me to museums all over the world, encouraging me to seek knowledge wherever I could find it.

I came out at fifteen and Mum made me a cake with the pansexual flag colours, which we ate together in front of the TV, watching our favourite 80s eighties films, quoting lines from Top Gun and Back to the Future in terrible American accents.

For a very long time, all I had in my life was my mum and my work.

Then there was Dru, who was too easy to love, and through her I met my little brother for the first time. Rex. A boy I’d been thinking about for too many years, imagining what he would be like and all the things we might have in common. Shared DNA doesn’t have to mean much, I know that, but it still felt like a connection I couldn’t pass on the potential of. I was too curious, have always been too curious by nature. Mum used to say that was how she knew I’d grow up to be a scientist like her and Dad.

Now, Mum is dead, and it was Rex who murdered her, and all I could do was scream for him to stop. Useless. Fucking stupid. As if my pleading would mean anything to him at that moment, after what I saw in that factory, what happened to Damon North. After what happened to our uncle Roux.

Thing is, I was right about how it would feel to meet Rex. There was a connection, instant and visceral. I felt it wind around my heart like barbed wire the moment our eyes met across the university lawn. Eyes the exact replica of our dad’s. He looked so much like Alex Nova, my breath had caught in my throat, threatening to choke me up. It had been a long time since I saw our dad’s face, and seeing it reflected back at me, albeit in an undeniably younger and angrier iteration, was bizarre. It’s like there was an edge there in the cut of my brother’s cheekbones, in the sardonic twist to his mouth that I can’t remember our dad ever possessing. Almost too much to deal with. But when he looked at me, I felt something, a tether pulling taut between us, and I’m certain, even now, that Rex felt it, too.

That’s what makes hating him so hard.

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Meet the Author

BL Jones is a twentysomething British author who spends all her free time reading and writing and taming her three much younger brothers. She works as a BSL interpreter in Bristol and lives with a temperamental bunny named Pepsi. She’s been writing stories since she was five, rarely sharing them with anyone except her numerous stuffed animals. BL has had a difficult journey into discovering and accepting her own queerness, and therefore believes that positive, honest, and authentic stories about queer people are very important. She hopes to contribute her own stories for people to have fun with and enjoy.

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